A new study from NASA has unveiled some interesting details about the tsunami that struck Japan after the March 11th earthquake:

Turns out, that wasn’t a tsunami after all that swept into northeastern Japan last March, killing nearly 20,000 people and launching a major nuclear and environmental crisis.

That was two tsunamis that merged far out at sea and rolled swiftly toward shore, more than 135 feet high.

That means the speeding wall of water was almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty, torch to toes. It washed inland more than six miles in some areas, destroying an estimated 125,000 structures.

The quake that day was the worst in Japan’s history and the fifth strongest ever recorded. Scientists from both NASA and the Ohio State University have been working on the mysteries of why the tsunami was so unexpectedly huge and why it struck the coast where it did.

They’ve been studying data from a trio of satellites that fortuitously happened to be passing over that part of the Pacific Ocean on Friday, March 11, Japan time. And they have now confirmed what until now had only been hypothesized:

That separate massive water movements, ignited by undersea earthquakes miles beneath the ocean surface, can grow and actually merge their massive energy and water volumes to roll across scores of miles of ocean undiminished by distance. They are, it now appears, shaped and steered by the unseen contours — the ridges and mountain ranges – of the ocean bottom beneath.

Picture the water displacement and movement when someone suddenly sits at one end of a full bathtub. Now expand that to oceanic size. And then double it.

Until now such twin tidal waves had never been observed, just theorized as possible explanations for such devastation as the 1960 Chilean tsunami that traveled trans-Pacific to kill about 200 in Hawaii and Japan.

“It was a one-in-ten million chance that we were able to observe this double wave with satellites,” said Y. Tony Song of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “It was like looking for a ghost. A NASA-French Space Agency satellite altimeter happened to be in the right place at the right time to capture the double wave and verify its existence.”

Song and C.K. Shum of Ohio State studied and modeled the data and described their findings at a scientific gathering in San Francisco this week.

As with the nuclear disaster that followed, it’s as if everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

It’s already caused Rick Perry to cancel a planned campaign appearance in South Carolina, and it may yet lead him to back out of tomorrow’s debate in California, but the real story in Austin is the fact that large swaths of Texas are burning:

Another fire in eastern Texas killed a mother and her 18-month-old child when flames engulfed their mobile home Sunday near Gladewater, the Gregg County Sheriff’s Department said.

“We got a long way to go to get this thing contained,” Gov. Rick Perry said about the fire raging near Austin. “I have seen a number of big fires in my life. This one is as mean looking as I’ve ever seen.”

Dozens of fires are burning across the parched state, the Texas Forest Service said Monday.

Earlier, the governor issued a statement in which he called the wildfire situation in Texas “severe” and said that all state resources were being made available to protect lives and property.

“We will pick up the pieces. We always do,” he told reporter

Texas is battling its worst fire season in state history. A record 3.5 million acres — an area roughly the size of Connecticut, Perry said — have burned since the start of the season in November as hot and dry weather, coupled with a historic drought, made conditions ripe for rapid fire growth.

Even without considering the fires, the Texas drought is on pace to be an extremely costly natural disaster, perhaps surpassing that of Hurricane Irene:

Texas Agrilife Extension Service estimated losses to be at $5.2 billion — already greater than the $4.1 billion of losses from the 2006 drought. “This drought is just strangling our agricultural economy,” professor Travis Miller, of Texas A&M University’s Department of Soil and Crop Sciences. Losses, told TIME Magazine.

The extended heat wave that has exacerbated the drought is expected to break soon, but without rain, farmers will have no relief before planting winter wheat in September or October. Texas produces one-third of winter wheat in the U.S., so analysts expect price increases if there is not enough rain for the wheat crop. Already from the summer, Texas, which produces 55 percent of U.S. cotton, has lost half its cotton crop. And scant summer rain has led to a scarce hay crop, so some ranchers are selling off cattle herds because they can’t afford to continue providing feed and water. The short-term price in beef may drop, but the long-term implications of losing entire herds will push up the price soon enough.

The remnants of a hurricane sweeping north from the Gulf of Mexico would go a long way toward alleviating the immediate risk of fire, if not end the drought itself, but so far this season there have been few hurricanes that have made it to the Gulf, and the one tropical system that developed there, which is a major rain producer now making its way to the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, avoided Texas entirely. The question for Texas is whether this drought, and the fires that resulted from a long summer of high temperatures, are an anomaly, or something that can be expected to happen repeatedly given the impact that continued rapid growth has had on the surrounding area.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and others on Capitol Hill, are saying that Federal disaster aid for states hit by Hurricane Katrina must be offset by spending cuts, but New Jersey’s Chris Christie isn’t too thrilled with that idea:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie reacted angrily to a fight brewing in Washington over whether Hurricane Irene disaster aid may need to be offset by federal spending cuts.

“Our people are suffering now, and they need support now. And they [Congress] can all go down there and get back to work and figure out budget cuts later,” the Republican governor told a crowd in the flood-ravaged North Jersey town of Lincoln Park.

Christie said no such discussion was held when help went to Joplin, Mo., where a deadly May tornado damaged 7,500 homes.

“We need the support now here in New Jersey, and that’s not a Republican or a Democratic issue,” Christie said, according to NorthJersey.com

Christie, of course, is doing his job as Governor of New Jersey but, one wonders how the Tea Party will feel about this one.

As flood waters have overwhelmed New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and, to a lesser extent, Upstate New York, the debate over whether the media “overhyped” Hurricane Irene this past weekend has faded fast. Now, there’s news that Irene could end up being one of the most expensive hurricanes to strike the United States since records were kept:

Hurricane Irene will most likely prove to be one of the 10 costliest catastrophes in the nation’s history, and analysts said that much of the damage might not be covered by insurance because it was caused not by winds but by flooding, which is excluded from many standard policies.

Industry estimates put the cost of the storm at $7 billion to $10 billion, largely because the hurricane pummeled an unusually wide area of the East Coast. Beyond deadly flooding that caused havoc in upstate New York and Vermont, the hurricane flooded cotton and tobacco crops in North Carolina, temporarily halted shellfish harvesting in Chesapeake Bay, sapped power and kept commuters from their jobs in the New York metropolitan area and pushed tourists off Atlantic beaches in the peak of summer.

While insurers have typically covered about half of the total losses in past storms, they might end up covering less than 40 percent of the costs associated with Hurricane Irene, according to an analysis by the Kinetic Analysis Corporation. That is partly because so much damage was caused by flooding, and it is unclear how many damaged homes have flood insurance, and partly because deductibles have risen steeply in coastal areas in recent years, requiring some homeowners to cover $4,000 worth of damages or more before insurers pick up the loss.

This could make it harder for many stricken homeowners to rebuild, and could dampen any short-term boost to the construction industry that typically accompanies major storms, Jan Vermeiren, the chief executive of Kinetic Analysis, said in an interview.

“Especially now that the economy is tight, and people don’t have money sitting around, local governments are broke, and maybe people can’t even get loans from the banks,” Mr. Vermeiren said.

The governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut sought expedited disaster declarations from the federal government on Tuesday, which would pave the way for more federal aid. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York wrote President Obama that he had seen “hundreds of private homes either destroyed or with major damage and an enormous amount of public infrastructure damage.” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey wrote the president that “immediate federal assistance is needed now to give New Jersey’s residents a helping hand at an emotionally and financially devastating time.”

Flooding and widespread power failures tied to the storm continued to affect tens of thousands of people in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut on Tuesday. And rivers and inland streams were still rising in New Jersey and Connecticut, forcing the evacuation of thousands of homeowners.

“I think this is going to end up being a bigger event than people think it is,” Connecticut’s governor, Dannel P. Malloy, said at a news conference. He added: “All of this is massive in scope. What the final dollar amount is, I don’t know.”

So, the final answer to the question I asked on Monday is a clear, definitive no.

Photo of downtown Bound Brook, New Jersey via NJ.com

I knew someone somewhere would make the argument that the destruction caused by Hurricane Irene, which was thankfully much less than feared, but I didn’t expect it to come from Politico’s Princeton and Columbia educated “economics reporter” who picked up the ball usually carried by Paul Krugman in these matters:

The power outages and shuttered airports may stop the engines of commerce for several days, but Hurricane Irene might have provided some short-term economic stimulus as billions of dollarswill likely be spent to repair the damage to the East Coast over the weekend.

Cumberland Advisors Chairman David Kotok saw the storm as likely jolting employment in construction, an industry paralyzed by the bursting of the real estate bubble in 2008.

“We are now upping our estimate of fourth-quarter GDP in the U.S. economy,” he said in an email Sunday. “Billions will be spent on rebuilding and recovery. That will put some people back to work, at least temporarily.”

Kotok expects GDP growth — which limped along at less than a percentage point for the first half of the year — to exceed 2 percent in the last three months of the year and potentially reach 3 percent.

Mark Merritt, president of crisis-management consulting firm Witt Associates, said the hurricane should provide a bump in economic activity over the next few months.

“After a disaster, there’s always a definite short-term increase,” Merritt said. “There will be furniture bought, homes repaired, new carpet, new flooring, all the things affected by flooding.”

(…)

University of Maryland economist Peter Morici estimates that property damages will total about $20 billion, with another $11 billion in lost net consumer spending. Any economic impact of the hurricane should be negligible over the next five years, he said.

In terms of recovering from the storm, Morici said there could be some economic growth at the end of this year and the beginning of next year, because with the rebuilding, “largely what we’re going to get is a private-sector stimulus package.”

We’ve seen this argument before, of course, and it’s no more logical when applied here than when Paul Krugman applied it the September 11th attacks, World War Two, or a hypothetical alien invasion. As economist Sandy Ikeda pointed out when writing about a similar argument made in the wake of the Haiti earthquake, the illogic of the fallacy becomes apparent when you take it to its logical conclusion:

This is the same “logic” behind the notion that the bombing of great cities to rubble during World War II was good for economic development because it was an opportunity to construct modern infrastructure that would have otherwise required many years to put in place.  Heaven forbid that we should have to wait for economic depreciation and normal wear-and-tear!  (It was, however, good for New York, which had the great fortune of being the only major western city left standing after the war, but that of course was because New York itself was not air-bombed.)

The fallacy becomes clear when, by logical extension, one ought then to recommend deliberately making our cities vulnerable to natural disasters, by perhaps refusing to build sea walls and tremor-resistant structures.  Why wait for disasters?  We should invite them!  Why waste resources on homeland security when just one well-placed nuclear bomb could boost our own economy, perhaps by as much as 0.3 percent?  Think of the jobs!  If you’re not into bombs, then how about advocating a new wave of 1960s-style “urban renewal” by unleashing an army of federal bulldozers onto our major urban areas?

What this argument ignores, and what people like Krguman and this Politico reporter refuse to recognize is the simple fact that destruction does not create wealth. The money that will be spent to rebuild, repair, and recover from Irene will doubtless line the pockets of the various contractors that will be hired to perform said work, but to argue that it “creates wealth” is simply a fallacy. By some estimations, the losses from Hurricane Katrina will total in the tens of billions of dollars. That’s wealth that doesn’t exist anymore, it’s gone. The money that will be will be used to pay for the recovery already exists and, rather than being invested in other projects, it will go toward repairing the damage caused by natural disaster. A home damaged by Hurricane Irene will be no more valuable after it is repaired than it was the day before the storm hit, for example. And this analysis doesn’t even take into account the losses from lower consumer spending that businesses will feel as a result of the storm, all of which will reverberate out into the economy as a whole.

David Boaz reaches back to Frederic Bastiat to put the final nail in the coffin on this one:

s Frederic Bastiat explained the “broken window fallacy,” a boy breaks a shop window. Villagers gather around and deplore the boy’s vandalism. But then one of the more sophisticated townspeople, perhaps one who has been to college and read Keynes, says, “Maybe the boy isn’t so destructive after all. Now the shopkeeper will have to buy a new window. The glassmaker will then have money to buy a table. The furniture maker will be able to hire an assistant or buy a new suit. And so on. The boy has actually benefited our town!”

But as Bastiat noted, “Your theory stops at what is seen. It does not take account of what is not seen.” If the shopkeeper has to buy a new window, then he can’t hire a delivery boy or buy a new suit. Money is shuffled around, but it isn’t created. And indeed, wealth has been destroyed. The village now has one less window than it did, and it must spend resources to get back to the position it was in before the window broke. As Bastiat said, “Society loses the value of objects unnecessarily destroyed.”

It’s understandable that people who learned their economics from professors who believe that you can create something out of nothing, and who don’t even seem to recognize the crucial role of private investment in creating wealth, would fall for a fallacy like this. That doesn’t make it any more untrue, though.

I concluded long ago that Rush Limbaugh was an insensitive jerk, but with 29 people dead and at least three states dealing with massive flooding, this pretty much takes the cake:

On his Monday radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh accused the news media of building up Irene out of their “desire for chaos.”

“It was a rainstorm and there was a lot of flooding and there were deaths associated with it,” Limbaugh said. “But they hype — folks, I’ll tell you what this was, was a lesson.

“If you pay any attention to this, they hype — the desire for chaos, I mean, literally — the media desire for chaos was a great learning tool. This is a great illustration of how all of the rest of the media in news, in sports, has templates and narratives and exaggerates beyond reality creating fear, so as to create interest.”

(…)

“Folks, it’s a national embarrassment, the hype over this hurricane,” he said. “What we have with the media — I’m going to tell you something else — Obama comes off of vacation to lead his nation to the response of Hurricane Irene, to draw contrast with Bush and Katrina. [It's] part of the re-election effort.”

NYT stats guy Nate Silver offers lots of charts and graphs pushing back against the notion that Hurricane Irene was overhyped.

Do hurricanes receive too much media coverage? Are they more or less newsworthy than airplane crashes? The avian flu? The iPhone 5? Shark attacks? The Dominique Strauss-Kahn case? The Libyan civil war? The royal wedding? Global warming? Anthony Weiner? The Dallas Cowboys?

I don’t know. What’s easier to evaluate is how much coverage Hurricane Irene received in comparison with other hurricanes. By that standard, the coverage was quite proportionate to the amount of death and destruction that the storm caused.

It’s easy enough to conduct a series of searches on NewsLibrary.com in order to determine how much press coverage past Atlantic hurricanes have received. The only tricky part is that the further you go back in time, the fewer sources the database has available, so we’ll have to adjust for this.

We’ll accomplish this by creating a statistic which I’ll call the News Unit (or NU). This is defined by taking the total number of stories that mentioned the storm by name (for instance, “Hurricane Hugo” or “Tropical Storm Hugo”; either one is considered acceptable) and dividing by the average number of stories per day that were available in the NewsLibrary.com database during that period. I then multiply the result by 10 just to make things a little bit more legible — so essentially, a News Unit consists of one-tenth of all the stories published on a given day.

I’m incredibly skeptical of Silver’s numbers here, even though I can’t offer better ones.

While there’s no discernible pattern from the above list, it seems obvious to me that there’s simply way more news out there because of the Internet and the proliferation of cable channels. So, I’m skeptical that a percentage of overall news coverage is the right way to look at this. I’d much prefer more static metrics: column inches on the front pages of the major newspapers, hours of CNN’s telecast devoted, programs pre-empted by the Big 3 networks, and the like.

Additionally, there’s just no way in hell that Katrina was only the 14th-most-covered hurricane since 1980. Any methodology that says so is hopelessly flawed. As Silver notes in other charts, Katrina not only accounts for “about 70 percent of all United States hurricane fatalities since 1980,” it simply dwarfs all other hurricanes on the chart combined in terms of fatalities. There’s simply been nothing like it in terms of coverage.

Further, I’m not sure how useful these sorts of comparisons are. Maybe hurricane coverage is generally overhyped; if so, being middle of the pack isn’t indication of not being overhyped.

Regardless, the very question is rather dubious.

Yes, it’s true that natural disaster reporting–indeed, severe weather reporting in general–is something of a joke. It’s hyper-dramatic, amateurish, and prone to tired tropes. It’s essentially reality TV and tinged with the sense that the anchors are actually hoping for catastrophe to keep people tuned in.

Beyond that, though, there’s a pretty harsh set of realities.

I noted yesterday morning the no-win politics of natural disasters, where politicians have to make hard calls impacting people’s lives and livelihoods with too little information. It’s far better to be too aggressive in evacuating and closing down government services and being second-guessed than it is to be blase and get a lot of people killed.

A lot of the “Irene is overhyped” meme got started in my neck of the woods, Washington DC and its environs. Howard Kurtz  in particular banged that drum. After a couple days of dire warnings, we were fortunate to get off pretty light. For all practical purposes, Irene was just a really heavy rainstorm in my area. We had some power outages and fallen trees, but we get that all the time.

By Sunday morning, Irene was downgraded to a mere tropical storm and people in my area lost interest. But it turns out that there has been massive flooding in New York and New Jersey and the death toll has climbed to 24. Granting that we don’t know how many people would have been killed absent the storm (presumably, some number of people who would have gotten killed in highway accidents instead stayed home watching storm coverage) that’s a pretty severe weather event. Calling something that killed two dozen people and cost billions in property damage “overhyped” is insensitive, to say the least.

Apparently, Michele Bachmann thinks that Hurricane Irene was some kind of message from her God:

She hailed the tea party as being common-sense Americans who understand government shouldn’t spend more than it takes in, know they’re taxed enough already and want government to abide by the Constitution.

“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending.”

Of course, I’m not sure how this computes given the fact that the storm largely spared Washington, D.C. and New York, while hammering a red states like North Carolina and a heavily Republican area like Virginia’s Tidewater region.

It means nothing, of course. It’s where the storm happened to hit. Trying to extract divine will, or a political message, from such an event is both dumb and offensive.

Update: Bachmann’s campaign now says that her comment was a joke:

Michele Bachmann’s press secretary characterized comments by the Republican presidential candidate, when she said Hurricane Irene was a message to Washington, as a joke.

“Obviously she was saying it in jest,” Alice Stewart told TalkingPointsMemo Monday.

Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t true of everything she says.

Within hours after Hurricane Irene had blown past the New York/New Jersey area, people were already starting to make light of a weekend’s worth of media coverage, both nationwide and locally in effected areas, that some say overhyped the story. Howard Kurtz leads the way this morning in his Daily Beast column:

Someone has to say it: cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon. National news organizations morphed into local eyewitness-news operations, going wall to wall for days with dire warnings about what would turn out to be a Category 1 hurricane, the lowest possible ranking. “Cable news is scaring the crap out of me, and I WORK in cable news,” Bloomberg correspondent Lizzie O’Leary tweeted.

I say this with all due respect to the millions who were left without power, to those communities facing flooding problems, and of course to the families of the 11 people (at last count) who lost their lives in storm-related accidents.

And I take nothing away from the journalists who worked around the clock, many braving the elements, to cover a hurricane that was sweeping its way from North Carolina to New England.

But the tsunami of hype on this story was relentless, a Category 5 performance that was driven in large measure by ratings. Every producer knew that to abandon the coverage even briefly—say, to cover the continued fighting in Libya—was to risk driving viewers elsewhere. Websites, too, were running dramatic headlines even as it became apparent that the storm wasn’t as powerful as advertised.

Kurtz goes on to note that the fact that the storm was baring down on the media capital of the world was likely one of the major reasons that it received the attention it did, and that a similar storm headed for, say, Pensacola would not have gotten the same amount of attention. Of course, there area  few points worth mentioning there. Pensacola and the Gulf Coast are used to hurricanes. When residents there hear that a storm is coming, they know what to do. More importantly, the buildings in a place like Florida are built to withstand a Category 1 or 2 hurricane and are surrounded by trees that can withstand strong winds. The same isn’t necessarily true of the Northeast. Places like New Jersey and New York rarely see the full force of a hurricane. The last time in my memory that such a storm came anywhere close to that area was Gloria in 1985, which cut across the center of Long Island, causing major damage and knocking out power for many residents for weeks thanks to all of the fallen trees and power lines. Put simply, a hurricane in the Northeast, is not the same thing as a hurricane in the south.

Kurtz’s hindsight doesn’t take into account one important thing, the fact the people in the path of the storm may have actually appreciated the coverage. If The Weather Channel’s ratings spike for the weekend are any indication, this certainly seems to be the case. If the storm was being “overhyped” then why were people watching?

More important to note, though, is the fact that Irene’s weakening as it approached the Mid-Atlantic didn’t become apparent until very late in the day on Saturday. By that point, most of the emergency notices, evacuations, and warnings (such as Chris Christie’s comment that surfers in Asbury Park should “Get the hell of the beach”) had already been made. It would have been both impractical and stupid for political leaders and emergency services to wait until that point to decide whether or not Irene was a real threat. This was a storm on track for one of the most heavily populated areas in the United States; waiting until the last minute to warn them would have been Katrina-sized idiocy. For that reason, I’m somewhat reluctant to criticize the pre-storm coverage of Irene. Yes, in restrospect it looks like it was much ado about nothing, but we had no way of knowing that 48 or 72 hours ago, and that’s when the people living on the coast needed to make decisions, and when public officials needed to do things like decide to shut down the New York subway system in order to protect the equipment from possible flooding.

Things did get pretty ridiculous once the storm passed, however. All three cable networks had brought in their big guns for the weekend and, with Irene long gone and fortunately little damage left in her path, they needed to find something to do with them. So, we got much of the coverage that Kurtz bemoans and very little of what actually was happening, such as the massive flooding hitting Central New York and Vermont in the wake of the storm.

There was plenty of stupid about the way the media covered Irene. The obligatory scenes of reporters standing on the beach as the surf pounded are the summer version of the “reporter in the middle of a blizzard” shots that we’ll see about five months from now, and they’re just as utterly pointless. However, as far as warning people of the danger of what was still one of the strongest tropical storms to hit the northeast in generations, it strikes me that Katrina has taught us to err on the side of too much information rather than too little.

One hesitates to make light of a natural disaster that has thus far killed 10 people, left more than a million without power and phone service, and has yet to play out. Yet, it’s fair to say that Hurricane Irene has been much, much less severe than heralded. The evacuations in New York and New Jersey, in particular, look silly given that it looks to be not much more than a late summer thunderstorm.

We can make fun of the Weather Channel, which has pimped this as “the storm of a lifetime for many of you” when there have been perhaps a dozen worse storms in the last twenty years. And the coverage on both CNN and Fox News yesterday became unbearable after a few minutes. We don’t need live coverage of idiot “reporters” standing around outside waiting for a hurricane to hit; we need facts about where the storm is, where it’s likely to go, and what the most recent projections are. Natural disaster porn is apparently riveting television for some, even if the incentives point to hype rather than sober reporting.

There’s simply no winning for politicians.

President Obama acquitted himself nicely, keeping it low key but cutting his vacation short and hanging out at the National Response Coordination Center to appear in charge. He learned the lessons of Katrina quite well and did his damnedest to appear to be in command and concerned. There wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do, of course, but looking concerned while not projecting panic goes a long way.

Governors and mayors have to make decisions about evacuation in time to actually affect an evacuation safely. The safe course is to take the worst projections, add 50 percent, and act accordingly. Nine times out of ten, though, people will be pissed that they were forced to evacuate unnecessarily. The other time, though, countless lives will be saved.

Ron Paul, whose home district has seen its share of hurricane-related disasters over the years, said after a campaign appearance today that he didn’t believe that there should be a role for the Federal Government in disaster relief at all:

“We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960,” Paul said. “I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district.

“There’s no magic about FEMA. They’re a great contribution to deficit financing and quite frankly they don’t have a penny in the bank. We should be coordinated but coordinated voluntarily with the states,” Paul told NBC News. “A state can decide. We don’t need somebody in Washington.”

Here’s the full interview:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Not surprisingly, Paul’s comments have drawn criticism, especially given that he made them as a Category 1 hurricane bares down on the Northeast and threatens New York City with one of its most serious natural disasters in recent memory. Lawrence Rafferty accuses Paul of being un-Christian, which is unfair largely because there’s nothing about being a Christian that mandates being in favor of compelled charity. Joe Gandelman argues that disaster relief is one of the things that Americans expect from the Federal Government, as does Steve Benen:

On the list of things Americans can and should expect from the federal government, “disaster relief” should be one of the few responsibilities that the left and right can endorse enthusiastically. It’s something people can’t do for themselves; it’s something states can’t afford to do; and struggling communities can’t wait for the invisible hand of the free market to lift them up, especially since it’s a market private enterprise isn’t eager to enter.

That last part isn’t necessarily true, of course. Private insurance covers rebuilding costs in most cases, the exceptions typically being homes constructed in areas like flood plains where the cost of insurance would be prohibitive. In that case, Congress established a government-provided flood insurance program that has the perverse result of subsidizing construction in high-risk flood locations. If homeowners had to pay the true cost to insure their homes in those areas, those areas would likely become far less attractive locations to construct homes. Logically, that would seem to me to be the result that we would want to see occur, rather than encouraging people to live in areas where their properties, and their lives, are at risk from floods.

Paul’s other complaint about FEMA is one that is well-founded by experience. More often than not, FEMA presence in a disaster area tends to hinder relief and reconstruction rather than help it. Additionally, Katrina showed us how organizations like the Red Cross were able to respond quickly to the disaster, while FEMA languished on the sidelines thanks to bureaucracy and, of course, the incompetence typical of government agencies. Moreover, we’ve seen examples in the past of how private action being able to respond faster, and more efficiently. After a 2005 tornado nearly leveled an Amish community in Indiana, other Amish and Mennonites came to help rebuild the town, a task they had largely accomplished within a month.  The same thing happened in Pennsylvania in 1985 when two neighboring towns were destroyed by tornadoes. One town had its aid administered by FEMA, the other was an Amish community. Guess which town was up and running first?

That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be a role for the Federal Government in disaster relief. Clearly, when something like Hurricane Irene threatens multiple states, there is a role for Washington to play. Rather than taking the top-down approach that FEMA does, though, it strikes me that a better alternative would be to make disaster relief  block grants available to local communities to use as they find necessary without having to comply with the endless regulations of the Federal Government. After all, what does some bureaucrat in Washington know about what the residents of Joplin, Missouri need?

Congressman Paul is wrong to say that there’s no proper role for the Federal Government when a major disaster strikes, but he’s right to point out that the Federal Government hasn’t really done a good job in that area lately.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s district was the epicenter of the earthquake the rattled the East Coast on Tuesday, and Mineral , Virginia has suffered serious damage to many of its buildings. Notwithstanding this fact, Cantor made it clear that he would not back Federal emergency relief for earthquake damage unless it was offset by spending cuts:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor assured his constituents on Wednesday that Congress “will find the monies” to assist earthquake victims in Mineral, Virginia – but the Republican lawmaker noted that “those monies will be offset with appropriate savings or cost-cutting elsewhere.”

Cantor and Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, speaking together in a news conference, had previously toured Mineral to assess the amount of damage the city sustained in the wake of Tuesday’s 5.8 magnitude earthquake. Mineral, which was at the epicenter of the quake, falls in Virginia’s 7th district, which Cantor represents.

Cantor was in Israel when he heard news of the quake, but said he “quickly decided that I had to get home to ensure I could do anything I could.”

When asked if the district would be receiving federal assistance from the government, McDonnell noted that the state had yet to do a thorough analysis determining “our own capacity through state and local resources and private and benevolent resources to be able to handle it,” and had not yet determined whether it was “prudent” to request federal aid.

But, Cantor added, “the federal government does have a role in situations like this. When there’s a disaster there’s an appropriate federal role and we will find the monies. But we’ve had discussions about these things before and those monies will be offset with appropriate savings or cost-cutting elsewhere in order to meet the priority of the federal government’s role in a situation like this.”

Now, with one of the most serious hurricanes to threaten the region in decades bearing down on the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, Cantor is also saying that any funds for hurricane damage relief must be offset, before we even know how big that bill might end up being:

Looks like House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) will extend his requirement that federal disaster relief be paid for by cutting spending elsewhere in the budget to Hurricane Irene.

“We aren’t going to speculate on damage before it happens, period,” his spokesperson Laena Fallon emails. “But, as you know, Eric has consistently said that additional funds for federal disaster relief ought to be offset with spending cuts.”

The thing about hurricanes that makes them different from a minor earthquake that has only caused, thankfully, minor structural damages even at the epicenter, is that they can cause damage in the billions of dollars from wind damage, coastal erosion, and flooding. Depending on the track it takes, one of which takes it very close to the heart of lower Manhattan, Irene could end up leaving a damage toll in the hundreds of billions of dollars in its wake. I’d love to see how Cantor is going to offset emergency spending that high.

I’m not unsympathetic to the point that Cantor is making here. As I said back in May when he made similar comments in the wake of the tornadoes that swept across the Mid-west and South, the idea that we should be forced to go into debt every time there’s a natural disaster makes no sense whatsoever. In fact, there seems to me to be a rather sensible solution:

If we are going to continue making payments like this, wouldn’t it make sense to have it be a budgeted item instead of having these requests added as supplements to a budgets that’s already been passed? Congress could approve the funding of a disaster relief fund every year and, to the extent it isn’t used, it would roll over to the next year to be added to the next year’s amount. Obviously, a large scale disaster like Katrina or 9/11 could require more funding, but most of the money that is paid out if Federal Disaster Relief goes for incidents that are far smaller in scale than those events. Perhaps this wouldn’t work given current budgeting rules, but it makes sense to me.

We already do something similar with the Highway Trust Fund, and even I’ll concede that there’s a role for the Federal Government in the case of a large scale disaster that is far beyond the ability of an individual community or state to handle. Setting up some kind of a fund like this, however, would make it far easier for Congress to allocate money for emergency relief without having to fight the partisan battles that inevitably result when you try to find offseting budget cuts.  I am probably being atypically optimistic about the ability of Congress to agree to something like this, and to resist the temptation not to tap into it to fund other programs, but it seems to me like a better way of handling emergency relief than what we’re doing now.

There’s a final point to be made, however, and it’s directed solely to Majority Leader Cantor. Picking political fights over disaster relief immediately after the emergency has occurred, or while people are still preparing for what looks like a pretty terrifying storm, isn’t exactly the way to win friends and influence people. You might want to work on your public relations skills just a bit, starting with the idea that nickel-and-dime accounting in the midst of a disaster makes you look like a bit of a jerk.

A parody Google+ page under the name of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman declares, “People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.”

People with a passing familiarity with economics will immediately recognize Frederic Bastiat’s fallacy of the broken window, articulated in 1850:

Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James B., when his careless son happened to break a square of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact, that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation – “It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?”

Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.

Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier’s trade – that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs – I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.

But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, “Stop there! your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”

It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.

Let us take a view of industry in general, as affected by this circumstance. The window being broken, the glazier’s trade is encouraged to the amount of six francs; this is that which is seen. If the window had not been broken, the shoemaker’s trade (or some other) would have been encouraged to the amount of six francs; this is that which is not seen.

And if that which is not seen is taken into consideration, because it is a negative fact, as well as that which is seen, because it is a positive fact, it will be understood that neither industry in general, nor the sum total of national labour, is affected, whether windows are broken or not.

Now let us consider James B. himself. In the former supposition, that of the window being broken, he spends six francs, and has neither more nor less than he had before, the enjoyment of a window.

In the second, where we suppose the window not to have been broken, he would have spent six francs on shoes, and would have had at the same time the enjoyment of a pair of shoes and of a window.

Now, as James B. forms a part of society, we must come to the conclusion, that, taking it altogether, and making an estimate of its enjoyments and its labours, it has lost the value of the broken window.

When we arrive at this unexpected conclusion: “Society loses the value of things which are uselessly destroyed;” and we must assent to a maxim which will make the hair of protectionists stand on end – To break, to spoil, to waste, is not to encourage national labour; or, more briefly, “destruction is not profit.”

What will you say, Monsieur Industriel — what will you say, disciples of good M. F. Chamans, who has calculated with so much precision how much trade would gain by the burning of Paris, from the number of houses it would be necessary to rebuild?

I am sorry to disturb these ingenious calculations, as far as their spirit has been introduced into our legislation; but I beg him to begin them again, by taking into the account that which is not seen, and placing it alongside of that which is seen. The reader must take care to remember that there are not two persons only, but three concerned in the little scene which I have submitted to his attention. One of them, James B., represents the consumer, reduced, by an act of destruction, to one enjoyment instead of two. Another under the title of the glazier, shows us the producer, whose trade is encouraged by the accident. The third is the shoemaker (or some other tradesman), whose labour suffers proportionably by the same cause. It is this third person who is always kept in the shade, and who, personating that which is not seen, is a necessary element of the problem. It is he who shows us how absurd it is to think we see a profit in an act of destruction. It is he who will soon teach us that it is not less absurd to see a profit in a restriction, which is, after all, nothing else than a partial destruction. Therefore, if you will only go to the root of all the arguments which are adduced in its favour, all you will find will be the paraphrase of this vulgar saying – What would become of the glaziers, if nobody ever broke windows?

Emphases mine in all cases.

I’m rather confident that Krugman, who has his PhD in economics from MIT and has won a half dozen international prizes for his contributions to macroeconomic theory, including the John Bates Clark Medal and the aforementioned Nobel, is aware of Bastiat’s work. But the parody account holder’s point is that he operates as if he doesn’t. Indeed,  as AllahPundit points out, Krugman made an almost identical argument three days after the 9/11 attacks.

Presumably, Krugman’s response would be that macroeconomics is different than microeconomics and public spending is different than private spending. As Matt Yglesias pointed out in a different context last week:

When Bastiat wrote that, “money” meant, in France, a commodity of which there was limited supply. Specifically, the so-called “Germinal Franc” contained 290.32 mg of gold. The modern economy isn’t like that. The quantity of money and credit are policy variables. If the country were afflicted with unemployed glaziers, Ben Bernanke could run around smashing bakery windows and leaving checks behind. The checks don’t need to be backed by anything, and the bakers will use the checks to hire glaziers to replace the lost windows without reducing their spending on tailors. Problem solved. This would be, admittedly, a silly way to resolve the problem. A more reasonable approach would be to cut the checks and pay the glaziers to do something useful. But it would work. Everyone understands that we don’t have a barter economy operating or a gold standard operating purely with cash-in-advance, but people often fail to see that this is important. But it makes a ton of difference. Among other things it means that if your argument about why something can’t be done turns at some key point on an alleged scarcity of money that something has gone awry.

So, yes, if major damage had been done to the infrastructure of the national capitol region, the Federal government could simply borrow money and pay to fix it without forgoing spending it was otherwise going to make. Politically, of course, that’s not going to happen in the current climate, in which simply raising the nation’s self-imposed borrowing limit to pay for spending already agreed to is cause for a standoff. But, if Krugman were king, we could fix the broken windows and still buy all the shoes we would have.

Indeed, that’s been US national policy for going on four decades now, in good times and bad. Our solution to the age-old guns versus better dilemma was ingenious: Both!

The fine print, unfortunately, that someone ultimately has to pay for it. We’re already at the point where just the interest on the national debt is more than we spend on virtually every non-defense discretionary category.

Additionally, given that the federal budget is $3.46 trillion and the annual GDP is $14.12 trillion, the earthquake would have had to be epic, indeed, for the repair bills to have provided much of a stimulus.

UPDATE (Alex Knapp): Krugman never said this – that Google Plus account isn’t his.

UPDATE (James Joyner): Alex beat me to the update. As “Carlos,” the person who professes to be behind the account, he did so to illustrate Krugman’s actual views. He collects several examples, in addition to the post-9/11 one noted in my original post. I’ve changed the post title and made minor changes to the original post to avoid perpetuating the false rumor that Krugman actually wrote the post in question. The analysis itself remains unchanged.

In my case, I confirmed that it was indeed an earthquake with others in my office, then blogged about it, and only then tweeted. But I had posts up within four or five minutes, certainly.

It’s called a Haboob, a name that comes from the Sahara Desert where they are quite common, last night though one hit Phoenix, Arizona:

A dust storm up to 50 miles wide and a mile high descended on the Phoenix area on Tuesday night, grounding flights, forcing drivers to stop and causing thousands of power outages.

Towering over skyscrapers and grounding flights, the wall of dust swept across the desert from the south at around nightfall, blanketing downtown Phoenix.

The National Weather Service said strong winds with gusts of more than 60 miles per hour  moved the dust cloud northwest through Phoenix and the cities of Avondale, Tempe and Scottsdale.

More than a dozen communities in the area also were placed under a severe thunderstorm watch.

The video of the storm is simply amazing:

Fortunately it seems that there were few injuries from the storm.